5th SCM Research Colloquium 2024/25

Seminar
11 Feb 2025
3:30 p.m – 5:30 p.m
M6050 Screening Room 1, Level 6, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre
Free admission.
Poster

The SCM Research Colloquium takes place approximately once a month for taught postgraduate, graduate students, faculty and professionals from creative media and other related disciplines to present their recent research topic/project. The colloquium offers a great opportunity for ideas exchange and intellectual conversations about one’s work. Each session will feature two speakers, a graduate student/guest speaker and a faculty member.

Each presentation is about 30 minutes, followed by 15 minutes open discussion. Seminar introduction and Q&A will be hosted by Prof. Espen Aarseth or Prof. Richard Allen. No registration is needed and light refreshments are provided

 

Seminar 5

11 February 2025, 3:30 p.m – 5:30 p.m

Chelsia, Jackie, and A Better Tomorrow: Hong Kong Syndrome in South Korea, 1977-1992 Sangjoon Lee

Anyone who spent their teens in South Korea in the 1980s would most definitely recall the heyday of Hong Kong film and popular culture in the local cultural sphere. Hong Kong cinema had long been known as “low-end” cultural products in South Korea and most local intellectuals looked down on them. It is, despite the distaste of local intellectuals, an indisputable fact that Hong Kong films had a significant influence on the 1970s South Korean cultural scene. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the location of Hong Kong cinema was rapidly changed. Chelsia, My Love (秋霞 1976)’s huge popularity and Jackie Chan's Drunken Master (1978)'s record-breaking success in the late 1970s catapulted what had been regarded as a ‘working-class men's culture’ into the domain of ‘everyone's popular culture.’ Melodrama, kung fu comedy, and gangster films became the main genres of the 1980s receptions of Hong Kong films in South Korea. However, the belle epoque of Hong Kong cinema did not last long. After Swordsman 2 (笑傲江湖II東方不敗1992)’s huge commercial success, Hong Kong cinema gradually declined in popularity in South Korea. Fans were growing tired of ‘low-quality’ martial arts and gangster films that had been hastily produced to meet the market’s needs. Moreover, the quality of local films improved significantly. This presentation chronicles the rise and fall of Hong Kong cinema’s reception in South Korea, from the early 1980s success of Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, and Sammo Hung to the mid-1980s Hong Kong gangster films of Chow Yun-fat, Andy Lau, and Leslie Cheung, concluding with the final note, the early 1990s' return to wuxia, which ended the syndrome.

21

 
Storytelling in Hindi Cinema: Doubles, Deception, and Discovery
Richard Allen

This talk presents the arguments of my book Storytelling in Hindi Cinema: Doubles, Deception, and Discovery. The figure of the double, which often takes the form of a star actor playing two different characters (say identical twins or look-a-likes), or assuming a dual persona, is a pervasive feature of post-independence Bombay Cinema that continues into contemporary Bollywood. I argue in my book that the double serves to typify the “performative” approach to storytelling in Indian popular cinema as a whole and I set out to identify and explain the main traditions of doubles storytelling and their transformation in response to social change from post-independence cinema to the present. In this talk I will discuss how I approach the figure of the double through the “poetics of recognition.” For the double is a trope in which, at one and the same time, an affiliation can be claimed, say the recognition of family resemblance, and a doubt is posed: who is this person that looks like me and are they an imposter? In this way, the double poses the problem of identity and difference that allows for the negotiation, if not reconciliation, of conflicting impulses or social identities in the manner of myth. At the same time, I will explain how the representation of the double draws on the Sanskrit and folk traditions, where everything can in principle be something else (for example, celestials beings can, willy-nilly, change into human form), while, at the same time, borrowing directly from the more down to earth, Western tradition of Shakespeare and 19th century melodrama via Hollywood, where empirical similarity between twins or look-a-likes confounds recognition.

Richard 1